Board’s resolution ‘tests’ Membership Guidelines

Announcing a new resolution for delegates May 4, the Mennonite Church USA Executive Board says it is “testing the status” of the denomination’s Membership Guidelines.

The resolution asks delegates at the June 30-July 5 convention in Kansas City to reaffirm the Guidelines and the Confession of Faith as the “guiding documents” for questions regarding membership and same-sex relationships.

PRAYER FOR DENOMINATION — Participants pray for Mennonite Church USA during a prayer retreat May 3 at Dyck Arboretum of the Plains in Hesston, Kan. About 25 people attended the two-hour event, the first of its kind preceding the denomination’s June 30-July 5 convention in Kansas City. Organizers expect similar retreats will take place in other parts of the country. Hosts for the Kansas retreat were Katherine Goerzen, coordinator of the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary Kansas Center, and John Murray, pastor of Hess­ton Mennonite Church. Resources for hosting a prayer retreat are online at ambs.edu/news-events/prayer-gathering.cfm. — Paul Schrag/MWR

The Confession says God intends marriage to be for a man and a woman for life. The Guidelines say pastors may not perform a same-sex covenant ceremony.

Delegates will consider the new resolution, along with one that urges “forbearance” among those who disagree “on matters related to same-sex covenanted unions.”

In a statement giving background on the new resolution, the board wrote: “Our interactions show that the church is divided on understandings of human sexuality and same-sex marriage. That is why we also support the resolution calling for grace, love and forbearance in the midst of our differences.

“We think it best to restate our commitment to the agreements made by delegates in 2001, while exercising Christian forbearance with those who differ in their understanding and application of those agreements.”

The board drafted the resolution as part of its 2013 commitment to allow delegates to address the substance of the Membership Guidelines and also to clarify the implications of the resolution on forbearance developed by Chicago Community Mennonite Church, North Baltimore Mennonite Church and Reba Place Church in Evanston, Ill.

“The board is supportive of the resolution on forbearance but felt like there was a need to describe our understanding of what forbearance means,” said Patricia Shelly of North Newton, Kan., moderator-elect. “We know we are living with different interpretations of what it means to follow Jesus, and we have to give some latitude for that. At the same time, forbearance doesn’t mean that we suspend all the agreements we’ve made in the past about how we will work together.”

A commitment not to re-examine the Membership Guidelines again for four years.

An assumption (stated as “we presume”) that area conferences will grant ministerial credentials in keeping with the newly developed Mennonite Church USA polity manual, A Shared Understanding of Church Leadership, as interpreted in their contexts. This manual includes the prohibition of same-sex covenant ceremonies.

A call to the Constituency Leaders Council to exercise its role as “elders” for MC USA. The resolution calls on the CLC “to exercise mutual accountability by engaging in conference-to-conference peer review when area conferences make decisions that are not aligned with the documents named above, and to make recommendations to the Executive Board if necessary.”

A commitment to “join hands for the work that binds us together — proclaiming Jesus’ gospel of peace, evangelizing the world and growing as missional Mennonite communities.”

Other things to do

The background to the resolution includes a description of the controversy that followed Mountain States Mennonite Conference’s grant­ing of a ministerial license to a pastor in a same-sex marriage. After “a number of conferences appealed to the Executive Board,” the board said it would not recognize the licensing.

Regarding the new resolution, Shelly said: “Undergirding this resolution is a sense that, in spite of our disagreements, we have other things that we want to do together. We want to focus in a new way on the common mission we feel a passion and calling for.”

On April 30, the Executive Board sent a pastoral letter outlining its hopes for the delegate assembly. It states: “We have been given a holy calling: to maintain the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” In a section that begins, “We write in a spirit of confession,” the board says: “We confess the sin of placing too much trust in organizational structures and polity to reconcile our disagreements.”

The forbearance resolution observes that there is no consensus about how gay and lesbian people are included in the church and calls for “grace, love and forbearance toward conferences, congregations and pastors in our body who, in different ways, seek to be faithful to our Lord Jesus Christ on matters related to same-sex covenanted unions.”

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